28/4/17

CONVOCATION 30 April 2017: Let’s Transform the Military Expenditure

Let’s Transform the Military Expenditure

Women in Black are opposed to war, opposed to the patriarchy and militarism. Both maintain the established order and are systems for domination and injustice that do not guarantee a just and sustainable human development. Militarism feeds the normalization of violence, devaluates care for life in all its integrity and prepares us for war.

The powerful promote rearmament and militarization with the objective of controlling people, generating displacements, seizing natural resources, restricting immigration and limiting civil rights. Sweden is re-establishing obligatory military service, and rearmament is intensifying in southern Spain. As we have recently heard from the President of the USA, another war is needed and, if there is no enemy in sight, create one. This spreads a dichotomous view of the world: we/them, die/kill, with me/against me…generating fear and imagining nonexistent enemies and assuring the growth and profitability of weapons factories.

We reject the investment of public money for military ends, including military research and development. While social expenditures are cut, military expenditures receive money from the general budget, benefit from extensions in the budget at mid-year and are hidden in items of other ministries. Military expenditures in Spain in 2016 amounted to 33,366,95 million Euros distributed among various budgetary items. Spanish militarism costs every citizen 718.76 Euros per year. Just the money that “Defense” spent beyond what was budgeted in 2015 could pay the minimum salary of 296.000 persons for one year. This money is invested in manufacturing and squandered in destruction when what has been manufactured is no longer useful.

Production and commerce in armaments feeds armed conflicts.
-With the cost of 2 Tomahawk missiles one school could be built.
-With the cost of 1 aircraft carrier, 50 hospitals could be built.
-With the cost of deploying a combat aircraft to another country, 684 jobs in sanitation could be created.

Women in Black:

♀Firmly oppose that Spain should fulfill its commitment to dedicate 2% of the gross domestic product to defense, which would suppose an additional investment of around 12,000 million Euros.

♀We demand that resources not be destined for research and development of weapons and that the only way to resolve conflicts not be military intervention.

♀We want that global military expenditures be dedicated to agriculture and food security, to access of renewable energy, supply and sanitation of water, defense of the environment, and the elimination of extreme poverty and hunger in a sustainable manner, to education and public health and research for civilian purposes.

"The redirection of about 10% of military expenditures worldwide would be sufficient to achieve important advances in some key objectives of sustainable development" Centre Delás